From nonprofit groups to regional banks and insurance companies, users in Philadelphia at the AIIM Conference & Expo are looking to simplify and consolidate their homegrown and proprietary content management systems to better link their data repositories with users.

Daniel Hart, an IT project manager for The Enterprise Foundation, said yesterday at the event here that his nonprofit community development group is looking to expand its use of Interwoven Inc.?s iManage enterprise content management (ECM) platform. The Enterprise Foundation?s investment corporation currently uses iManage, but the Columbia, Md.-based nonprofit wants to roll out the system across its entire operation.

The Enterprise Foundation currently uses shared drives for its data, which Hart said isn?t very efficient. And it uses Macromedia Inc.?s Contribute software for Web content management.

"We?re looking for something that can manage documents, content and workflow" inexpensively, given the nonprofit group?s limited financial resources, Hart said. Many of the packages offered by mainstream ECM vendors are too costly and offer more features than the group needs. The Enterprise Foundation has about 415 users who need to share and find data in an IT system that handles grants management, loan applications and programs, low income housing tax credit applications and more, he said.

"We have a pretty complex workflow for different products that we manage."

With that in mind, Hart attended a conference "slugfest" where five ECM vendors -- IBM Corp., FileNet Corp., Open Text Corp., Global 360 Inc. and EMC Corp.?s Documentum unit -- touted their own products and pointed out weaknesses in competitors? wares. "It helped me out a little bit," said Hart, who is still undecided about what system he will choose.

Another user, the technology manager for a West Coast-based bank who asked that his name not be used, said the lack of a central ECM system for his company?s 15,000 users makes it difficult to get data to everyone across all departments. "We need to improve how people get to what they need to get to" in the bank?s data depositories, he said. "What that?s going to entail, we don?t know yet. We?re in the investigation stage now."

The answer, he said, will involve finding a vendor who can help the bank bring all of its repositories and data together in the most seamless way possible. "We have stuff scattered all over the place, in different formats."

Complicating the task is the fact that much of the bank?s data resides on a mainframe, requiring an ECM system that can work with that type of architecture. Not all ECM products have that kind of flexibility, and that has been a stumbling block, he said. "We?re trying to determine if we can take [products] off the shelf or if we have to write it," he said.

An ECM manager for an insurance company based in the Southeast, who asked that his name and company name be withheld, said he faces a similar problem: joining multiple silos of information so that all of his 4,100 users can search it. Each of the insurance company?s 32 departments currently has its own data silo. "We?re looking for a way to integrate them" through central or departmental repositories that can share data, he said.

The insurance company?s existing ECM patchwork includes homegrown applications and proprietary packages that handle everything from claims processing to marketing and mailroom tasks.

The hardest part of the process, he said, has been getting all of the pieces to work together, as well as linking multiple facilities in different locations. "Integrating with legacy applications is a big, big part of what we?ve got to do," he said. "I think we?ve made the decision [to proceed]. We?d like to at least have the repositories in place by the end of the year."